When people are falling in love, they rarely have fantasies of power: "I'm going to make this sucker do whatever I want!" Rather, they have fantasies of value, of loving and being loved. We marry for value, not for power. Yet most marital discord is a substitution of power for value.
It is easy to confuse power with value in love relationships. Humans feel empowered in basically two ways, through:
• Adrenalin arousal - prepares us to exert power, i.e., manipulate the environment or other people. This gives a temporary sense of power, confidence, and self-righteousness, but sets us up for frustration if we fail to exert power, i.e., manipulate the environment or other people.
• Creation of value - making something or someone important and worthy of appreciation, time, energy, effort, and sacrifice. This gives a sense of meaning and purpose over time.
When falling in love, you don't think in terms of power, yet you feel empowered, because you are creating value for the person you love. You feel empowered, but you are not exerting power.
Of course, societal issues have a great deal to do with the confusion of power and value. We are more likely to feel powerless today because:
• We are saturated with information and confronted with choices of little significance. This subverts the natural hierarchical processes of the brain, making everything equally important and, therefore, equally unimportant.
• Although we have more pleasure and convenience, we create less value and put large amounts of emotional energy into things we do not believe are important and, therefore, do not produce meaning and purpose.
• We try to separate feeling good from doing good things, i.e., behaviors consistent with our deepest values, and, worse, we expect to feel good when we ignore or violate our deepest values.
• We are subject to an increasingly vast contagion of negative emotions. We suck up emotional pollution from the environment.
Because feeling empowered depends on creating value, we are likely to feel less empowered when we stop. When we stop showing value to loved ones, they are likely to reciprocate, because they feel less empowered and, usually, more vulnerable. Powerlessness/vulnerability stimulates one of four impulses in virtually all social animals:
1. Avoid
2. Submit
3. Control or dominate
4. Affiliate or cooperate
If we choose the fourth alternative, our relationships will thrive. Many couples avoid or submit but do so resentfully. The resentment eventually moves them toward control or dominance. In other words, they substitute power for value. The exertion of power sometimes gets them compliance, sometimes fear, always resentment, but never value. You cannot criticize, stonewall, nag, manipulate, coerce, or threaten someone into genuinely valuing you.
The secret of feeling empowered without exerting power is to focus on creating value, through interest, compassion, and care. In general, when people feel valued they cooperate, when they feel devalued, they either resist or submit with resentment. If you want value in your relationship (if you want to feel empowered beyond the temporary adrenalin arousal of anger and resentment), you must create and show more value.
When feeling adrenalin arousal -- usually experienced as anger or resentment -- you must ask yourself:
Do I want to exert power or create value?
Do I want to value this person or devalue this person?
Do I want this person to value or devalue me?
In short, you must get in touch with your core value.
